Chapter 24 - W. H. Auden

Summary

Auden’s poetry and ideology were shaped by each era and circumstance in which he lived and worked and by those by whom he was surrounded. His early views on politics, religion, sexuality, and the importance of art, music, and poetry to society – all of which defined the poet as Britten knew him in the 1930s and early 1940s – underwent some form of revision thereafter, providing fodder for those critics who sought to conscript him to the turbulent period leading up to and including the Second World War, hailed by many as the ‘golden age’ of his poetry. In England, particularly, some scholars have posited that Auden’s rejection of his ‘age’ – and his country in 1939 – did damage to both his contemporary and posthumous reputations, going so far as to posit that he had squandered his opportunity to be considered that nation’s greatest poet of the twentieth century. As this chapter explores, Auden’s outlook on the varying matters that crept into his poetry was complex and often contradictory.